Jeffery Ford: We Must Reunite the United States of America

Ever since The Donald became The President, we Americans have been bombarded week after week with explosive news stories that are keeping many of us in a state of anxiety, fear, depression and even confusion.

Millions of Americans absolutely love President Trump for lowering our taxes, dramatically reducing unemployment, strengthening the value of our stock markets and for boldly standing up for American businesses while negotiating with foreign leaders. It’s beyond many people’s comprehension why anybody wouldn’t fully support such a strong and accomplished leader.

Millions of other loyal Americans completely despise Trump because they see him as a president who is demonstrably racist against Latinos and others due to his immigration policies that are literally intended to wall off our country to everyone who lives south of our border. Many women and men also view Trump as a despicable misogynist and are totally unable to fathom how such a man who was recorded bragging about grabbing women in an exceedingly vulgar manner could possibly have succeeded in becoming our nation’s commander and chief.

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Whether we consider ourselves a Republican, Democrat, an Independent or simply just a proud American, it should be quite easy for us to compassionately and easily understand how good people can all view Trump in a myriad of different ways with varying degrees of intensity.

It should be easy — but there’s really nothing easy about it because we are presently living through a time of not just contentious political turmoil but also a time of dizzying technological, social and cultural change.

Americans are voluntarily and purposefully segregating themselves into different camps. People are even identifying each other by what news sources they prefer.

“What? You’re a Fox News viewer? I’m going to block you off of my Facebook page!”

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“What? You get your news from CNN? Well, I guess we won’t be having you over this year for Thanksgiving supper.”

Some folks begin each day reading the Huffington Post and other people choose to start their morning reading The Western Journal.

Even our Google, Facebook and Twitter experiences differ greatly from one another due to the algorithms those sites have implemented.

These are important differences to consider because it wasn’t all that long ago that nearly everyone in the United States primarily relied upon only CBS, NBC, ABC and perhaps a local newspaper for the vast majority of their news sources.

While it’s absolutely incredible that we have so many more news options available to us — it also makes it exponentially more difficult to discuss a wide variety of political, social and cultural issues with people whose worldview is being molded by sources and forces beyond each other’s comprehension.

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But even if we are totally unable to fully appreciate where someone else is coming from — we still must strive to communicate with each other in a polite, civil and understanding manner no matter how heated the topic may be.

The incendiary rhetoric must come to an end. We are all Americans and we must channel our passions and beliefs into constructive, not destructive dialogues no matter how difficult that might be. We are dividing ourselves from one another instead of uniting with each other in mutual understanding.

I’m not too proud to admit that I’m just as guilty of this as anyone else. I frequently struggle with adequately making my points as strong as possible without becoming insensitive and hurtful to others in the process — and sometimes I fail miserably and communicate in ways I sincerely regret.

I’m human, you’re human, and everyone around us is just as human as we are. Which is great news because we humans possess the amazing capacity to change in an instant.

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We can choose kindness and compassion over winning, domination and ego.

We can choose being happy over always being right.

We can also choose to love our political adversaries because no matter how it might appear in the most divisive of moments, we truly do share miles and miles of common ground between us.

That common ground is called the United States of America. Let’s choose to unite the best we can while pledging our allegiance not only to our majestic flag but also to each other.

The views expressed in this opinion article are those of their author and are not necessarily either shared or endorsed by the owners of this website.